Chapter One
One
Billie Walker was right back in the moment.
The sun was warming her face, a world of abstract Technicolor behind her eyes as she closed her lids against a brief gust of wind, turning the corner on Stephansplatz.
Each detail was so clear, so present, even now.
There was the smell of something baked in the air.
A shop’s delicious daily offerings of Sachertorte and Apfelstrudel.
She’d laughed at something Jack had said.
She could feel his large, reassuring hand in hers as they walked, their world a bubble of new love and the excitement of foreign soil and the thrill of a story.
No caution. No fear. Their leather shoes clicked on the cobblestones and she could hear voices beyond the corner, then a shouting that pulled her from her reverie.
Her reporter’s notepad was in her hand in an instant, and she broke from Jack and looked down to catch the pencil that was slipping.
When she looked up, she saw it. She stopped in her tracks, as Jack already had.
The world came rushing in, shattering the illusion of safety.
A dozen women were on their knees in the large square, surrounded by men in uniform.
They were weeping quietly as their heads were shaved.
She saw blood and hair, naked skin and tears.
A man was in his underthings on the street beside them, cowering, his back bloodied, his beard shaved, his yarmulke crushed on the ground beside him.
A crowd watched. Some of them were shouting, their fists raised.
Billie couldn’t hear what they were saying through the sound of the blood pumping in her ears.
Just as the urge to run forward and intervene struck her, one of the storm troopers turned, caught her eye.
She looked away in an instant, as if the gaze would burn her.
She closed her eyes.
What they saw in Vienna was always there, just waiting for her lids to close.
One day in 1938 she’d opened her eyes to find it, and now it was there each time she closed them—a kind of reversal.
Why those memories? Why that weekend? It was all wrapped up in Jack, in the war, in everything she had to somehow leave behind now, everything that her head told her was over but her heart still clung to.
Billie shook herself gently and gathered up her things.
There was no sense in lingering on memories, even if they wouldn’t let her go just yet.
She wasn’t in Europe anymore. She was back in Australia.
It was 1946, a new world, and she had to make a new life in it.
She had to, and she would. The tram was slowing, pulling up next to Central.
She removed a small gilded compact and lipstick from her handbag and reapplied a touch of Tussy’s Fighting Red. This was her stop. It was time to rise.
“Morning, John,” Billie called as she strode into the foyer of Daking House, moving swiftly on long, graceful legs, yet as quietly as a cat, her crepe-soled oxfords making only the softest sound on the hardwood floor.
It was to here that she took the tram most days of the week, for this was where she rented an office.
On hearing Billie’s voice the lift attendant stood to attention, roused by the presence of his oft-claimed “favorite customer” in the building.
There was no reason to disbelieve him on that score.
When Billie arrived in the morning it was always past ten, well after the delivery boys had stocked the ground-floor shops and left again in their trucks, and the silver-haired businessmen had moved through the lobby and disappeared into their various offices, frowning and shuffling, plenty of them already stinking of cigars by nine.
Billie never shuffled. She preferred the smell of French perfume to cigar smoke, and if she knew anything about reading the body language of quiet men, the lift attendant did, too.
Other tenants like the Roberts Dancing School, the Sydney Single Tax Club, the United Jewish Overseas Relief Fund, the players who frequented the billiards room downstairs, and the like, well, they came and went at odd hours, a bit like Billie often did, but the accountants and legal types and those men from the New South Wales Kennel Control Board kept strict schedules and at this hour were hunched at their desks in their professional chambers, applying themselves to the type of work that was simply not in her blood.
Few clients in her trade could be expected to knock at nine a.m. Midnight, however—well, that was not entirely unheard of.
Her trade might have a mixed reputation, but the ways of the world demanded it. As did her purse.
“Good morning, Ms. Walker . . . Always a pleasure,” the lift operator said.
When he’d started at the building in August, replacing a kind-faced, gray-haired woman who had held the position during the war years, this new lift operator had insisted that she call him by his first name, John.
But just what to call Billie was no small question these days.
Those in his line of work customarily used formal titles and, new to his job, John Wilson was reluctant to accept her invitation to refer to her simply as “Billie,” as the previous attendant had come to.
Not just yet, anyway. But every time someone referred to Billie as “Mrs.” it reminded her of the uncertainty of her personal life.
It reminded her of loss and set her on edge.
“Miss” wasn’t quite right, either, she felt, and she could hardly be called that after all that had gone on in the past few years, including a wartime wedding, albeit a makeshift one with no ring and few witnesses.
In the end she had requested “Ms.,” the term sitting better.
It had its roots in the old titles, as Billie understood it, and was coined at the turn of the century as a more neutral honorific for women, but was little used.
She had seen it mentioned in a New York Times article some years previous and at the time of reading hadn’t any inkling how well it would later suit her.
John Wilson had accepted the request without comment, and now Billie got to hear “Ms. Walker” every working day of the week.
In the wider world, well, there was always the tripping over “Miss,” “Mrs.,” “Madam,” “Mademoiselle”—the whole complicated matter of a woman of marriageable age but uncertain status.
Strangely, with all that the war had taught the world about the inherent precariousness of life, such details seemed to have gained more, not less, prominence, as if the years of darkness had been prompted by a title, by a woman, rather than by Nationalsozialismus and the sinister edges of the will to power.
It was part of a grasp for stability, Billie supposed, a nostalgic turning back to something simpler, more rigid and readily understood.
But Billie didn’t want to turn back. That wasn’t her style.
And, besides, there was no undoing what the war had done.
Wilson dutifully stepped back to usher her into the nearest of the building’s four lifts—two for passengers, two for cargo.
Only one of the passenger lifts was currently running, and they’d just started operating it from the ground floor again in recent months; previously the tenants had climbed the stairs to the first level to conserve power.
It still felt a touch luxurious to go up from the lobby.
Billie stepped inside the cab and Wilson slid the outer and inner metal doors closed with his strong left hand, the grille unfolding like a wall of opening scissors.
His right hand, once his dominant hand, had not survived the war, and neither had that full arm.
His suit was pinned on the side—not so unusual a sight in Sydney these days.
His hair was neat and short, but the hairline was uneven on one side.
His face, once conventionally handsome, Billie guessed, was marked by burns, though both his eyes, his nose, and most of his mouth were unscathed.
For more than a year now the city had filled with broken men returning from overseas.
Many were shunned for the disfigurements they could not hide, and the Australian bush was filling with such men, just as it had after the Great War—men who preferred lonely solitude to the stares they were met with on city streets, the pointing of children, the constant reminders.
But John had returned to a relieved family and was already well liked by those in the building. He’d made it back, while many had not.
They rode up, the cab rattling.
“How is June?” Billie, as she often did, inquired after Wilson’s wife. “And the children?”
“Very well. Thank you for asking,” he said, and his mouth moved into an uneven smile, his eyes crinkling warmly.
He slowed the lift at the sixth floor, jogging the lever up and down a couple of times to line it up with the hallway outside.
He let go of the handle too suddenly and the elevator lurched, the dead man switch kicking in.
“Apologies, Ms. Walker. Just as well we’ve got the switch to, uh, stop us, if my hand slips,” he said, reddening slightly beneath his scars.
If you didn’t keep your hands continuously on the lift control, you could activate the mechanism—the actual death of the man operating it wasn’t necessary to set it off.
Wilson was new to his certificate, but it happened to those with more experience, too.
He pulled the grille doors open. “Watch your step.”
“Always,” Billie replied and flashed him a smile.
She walked along the hall, passing offices already humming with activity, until she arrived at a wooden door fitted with a frosted glass window, a simple title painted in black across it:
B. Walker, Private Inquiries